This article is part 2 of a series about the development of Duotrigordle. Click here to read Part 1 and Part 3.
This article discusses the journey of adding advertising to my website, Duotrigordle. It's a fun story with a bit of drama, so please enjoy!
Buy Me A Ko-fi
Before talking about adding ads, it's worth bringing up the first stream of monetization for the website.
About a year after the site's launch, a friend suggested starting a buy-me-a-coffee donation page for loyal fans of the game. I thought that would be a great idea, it would give fans of the game a way to offer support, and of course let me make some money on the side.
I set up a donation page on Ko-fi and put a link to it on Duotrigordle.
To this day, the support on Ko-fi has been a wild success, with over 2300 coffees donated. From the bottom of my heart to everyone who donated, especially those who left a heartwarming comment, thank you!
For a while, Ko-fi donations were helpful to fund the server costs for Duotrigordle. Now that I'm running advertising, donations are far less necessary.
Adding Ads
Around December 2022, I figured it would make sense to put ads on my site.
Yes, I know, ads suck. Believe me, I dislike seeing them just as much as you.
But, as I'm still a university student, the extra money definitely helps pay for server hosting and my other bills. It's my website after all, I get to do what I want!
For the record, I don't mind if you use an adblocker, I believe as a user you have the right to control what you see on your own computer. That said, consider donating to my Ko-fi which, in addition to allowing you to disable ads in Duotrigordle, will also support my work!
The first ad provider I tried was Google AdSense, which I used for about 6 months until I switched to another provider.
AdSense had the lowest revenue out of all the ad providers I tried, but the service is open to everyone and is a good starting point if you want to try monetizing a website. Most other ad providers require some kind of sign up process, but in return they'll give you higher revenue and better customer service.
The Adpocalypse
A few months after earning revenue from AdSense, I got a sales email from an ad provider, who I unfortunately cannot name. They claimed that their ad network could offer higher revenue over Google AdSense, which to be fair was true, but this is true for pretty much every ad provider.
I figured I would give this company a try. At first, their service didn't require any commitment, but very soon they started pushing their "Premium" ad service, which requires a monthly fee in return for higher ad revenue. If you think about it, this system doesn't make much sense: if they're charging you a fee every month, but they make you more additional revenue with their premium service anyways, why charge me a monthly fee? Simply deduct the fee from the monthly revenue and give that to me directly (this is how they operated in practice anyways).
However, they did have a cheaper monthly fee if you signed up for premium for a year, similar to how Netflix charges you less if you sign up annually. So that's what I did, I signed the premium contract with this company for a year. This meant that I was stuck exclusively serving ads from this company for the next year.
This frankly wouldn't have been a big deal if I didn't run into problems with their ad service.
Everything was going fine until the summer of 2023. One day I started receiving angry emails from users:
That was strange, I thought. The ads on my website seemed like they were fine, until I refreshed the page enough times and finally got the same ads that people were complaining about:
The game was essentially unplayable with ads like these being displayed, since they covered the entire screen. I immediately removed ads from my website and notified the company about the issue. They let me know about a week later that the problematic ads had been fixed. I turned the ads back on.
I could forgive the company for this incident if the same issue didn't occur again only 2 weeks after I turned the ads back on. I was forced to keep ads off for 2 more weeks until the company finally got their act together and fixed their ads.
I was furious. Looking at the viewership graph during this time, you can see that I lost close to 30% of my users as a result of these incidents. Many people were frustrated at the ads that made the website unusable and understandably stopped playing.
I asked if I could at least have some financial compensation for my loss of revenue from the company's mistake, but their manager was cold and denied my request.
Don't Sign a 1-Year Exclusive Contract!
For those of you with business sense, you know that you should never sign an exclusive contract with another company for 1 whole year unless you have a good reason to.
After causing a large portion of my users to leave, I understandably no longer wanted to partner with this company.
This is when my decision to sign their 1-year exclusive contract came back to bite me: despite seeing that I was unhappy with their service, the company refused to void my contract, and I was forced to show ads for this company until May 2024 when my contract finally expired.
I immediately started looking around for other providers and finally settled with my current ad provider, Playwire (note: this article isn't sponsored or endorsed by them).
The ad company that I'm partnered with now has been much more reasonable than the previous company. They generate more revenue than the previous company and have had much better customer service. My current ad provider's contract only requires 30 days of notice to leave, which as far as I can tell is the industry standard in the advertising business.
Click here to read Part 1 about the history of features added to the game, or Part 3 about the technical behind-the-scenes of creating the website.